YOUR AD HERE — REACH DISCERNING READERS OF SERIOUS JOURNALISM
Rates upon inquiry. Clowns extra.
COURTS✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Real or Onion?
Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
Merry Go Slower - Distressed
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Alf van Beem · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
A columnist offers six real headlines and challenges readers to spot which, if any, came from The Onion — the exercise being that reality has gotten hard to distinguish from parody. The piece then turns to the Washington arch reportedly repurposed as a sniper and drone perch and a new White House ballroom described as housing military protection, prompting a mock call for readers to nominate other landmarks for fortification.
Separately, the column flags an Illinois federal judge's ruling on Google's AI Overviews, in which Google's lawyers argued a standard disclaimer marks the AI answers as mere starting points, not statements of fact. The column notes that disclaimer is nowhere to be found when using Google's AI mode directly.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
When a newspaper quiz about telling news from parody gets harder every week, the parody writers aren't the ones who changed. A ballroom with military protection is the sort of thing a kid draws in the margin of his homework, and now it's on the books. As for Google, a disclaimer that shows up in court but not on your screen is about as useful as a smoke detector kept in the lawyer's office.
